It was never meant to be, nor should it ever have been. Yet, there we were lining up for the start of the 30 Pack Marathon…in July…in Tucson, Arizona. Madness.

Why? Described in greater detail at my old full-time blog (Link (roll over me to see where I go)) the idea grew from a stupid suggestion meant to shut up a bunch of us that wouldn’t stop banging on about (or, indeed, banging out) Beer Miles. “A real man would do it as a whole marathon and would drink a case…no! A 30 pack!” came the wag‘s taunt and several of us thought, yeah…he’s RIGHT!

So, I arranged for a local hostelry to supply the beverage and shelter (years before the Ice Bucket Challenge, we were grateful for the buckets of ice water thrown over us every two laps by the staff who came in for the stupidity on a normally ‘closed’ day). There was a beer at the start and one every 1/29th of a full marathon thereafter (the loop through this desert neighbourhood back to the bar, The Meet Rack).

No one finished. One guy that still claims to have done also still brags about cheating and several of us making an honest go of it laughed at him as he poured out half or more of the later beverages. I was pulled by the medical team (a military town, a lot of our running group were combat nurses) in the midst of lap 24 whilst trying to crawl out of a ditch. This was the least of the indignities photographic evidence shows that I (or, anyone else that made it past the halfway point) inflicted upon themselves.

Strong coffee, fatty food, and a pool to soak in at the hotel across the road (managed by a former Rack employee, so open to us) helped with the recovery up to the point that I realised I had severely sprained my ankle during one of the many falls in the last couple of laps.

There was never a time limit set, though, and the following week –still in pain from the sprain– I returned, ordered up 7 beers, downed one, and walked back to whence I had been carried away in ignominy. From there, a slow jog around the remaining course, then the other 5 laps. The victory was sweet.

{It is the time of the Fetch Everyone advent calendar — no idea when this link will go dark, but not before Xmas 2017 — and behind each door there are running gadgets and treats that, by checking the door, you can get entered into a prize draw. There are also ways to get extra tickets in the hat and the one for today required a 100+ word blog entry titled “Glorious Failure;” this happened in previous years, too, and is usually the only time I use that blogspace. So, I threw together a brief description of the 30 Pack Marathon and posted it there with more of a P.O.V. of a participant in the first one, less of the founder. I like the way the note came together and thought, while not good it isn’t really half bad, either; so, it is copied here where I am more likely to refer back to it. There may be more of these — depends on what Fetch comes up with.}

We went to the Notting Hill Carnival to drink beer (check), listen to loud music (check), look at mostly undressed folks (check-a-roonie), and to eat some Carribean food (check).

I didn’t take a lot of photos after the crowd grew almost unmanageable so this is what you’ll get from this page (apologies, but just image search “Notting Hill Carnival 2017” and you’ll find whatever it is you think you want).

While the crowd probably contained every black person within 500 miles, this is London so (despite racists moaning about being overrun) it was a fairly pale shade, overall.

I was excited to find an ornate VR postbox (my effort to prove myself the whitest guy at the Carnival, according to Jackie):

And, the home of one of the founding paraders:

The Grenfell disaster weighed on everyone’s minds and there were tributes to the victims throughout (and, miraculously, an actual minute of silence in this loudest of London parties).

That’s not why there was so much smoke in the next picture. We imbibed in a modicum of hash before travel, but we could easily have sustained a contact high everywhere we went. “Mahr-ree-wanna, mahr-ree-wanna…like the Bob Marley, mon,” intoned one street salesman as we pushed through a crowd. That and the hundreds of jerk chicken and goat curry stands on almost every street left our clothing reeking of char.

The food was grand, too. J had the goat and I had the chicken (contributing to the avian holocaust wherein more chicken is consumed in 2 days than in the whole rest of the London year). I also had these numbers handed me on the Tube the day before:

Entrepreneurs in the neighbourhood rent out their toilets for £3 a go (£5 if you want to jump the queue). The dry compost loos provided by the borough make it an understandable (if not justifiable) luxury.

The first and last — the Alpha and Omega, if you will — stands we saw were this troupe of God Botherers:

One of them — at the far left of the photo — gave me a leaflet with a long, preachy cartoon. Distilled, below, are the bits I thought I could use here (but opted not to bother):

Love hot dogs,
Armour hot dogs.
The dogs kids love to bite. (from a long running Armour Hot Dogs commercial with lyrics that could never be aired today)

We don’t have Memorial Day in England, but the last Monday of May is a Bank Holiday so we consider it the equivalent at the house. The Uniform Monday Holiday Act of 1968 moved Memorial Day from May 30 (regardless the day of the week) to the last Monday in May. I still find this a travesty and something implemented for the sake of industrial convenience over tradition. By the time we returned to the States from Australia in 1974, Georgia had adopted this as well so the holiday no longer fell on my birthday but on the 27th of May that year.

It was 2 months to the day until the House Judiciary Committee passed the first of three articles of impeachment. The White House had been stonewalling the independent prosecutor and the Congressional investigations and trying hard to rewrite the narrative of its high crimes and misdemeanours. I had been reading the transcripts of the White House secret recordings since they had been published in April and would most likely have had my copy open next to the pond to read between dips. Does any of this sound familiar?

I don’t know specifically how I spent that Memorial Day but I know I didn’t start smoking pot until the 4th of July that year so I probably just sneaked a few beers from the folks’ bottomless stash and listened to some baseball on the radio (WSB, Home of the Braves with your host Skip Carey, and the Braves, uncharacteristically, won 9-1 over the Phillies). Inevitably there would be a cookout with ribs, burgers, and of course hot dogs.

We don’t have proper hot dogs here, either, but at least I found some that aren’t in a can (yes, Americans, tinned wieners!). We set up our network speaker to stream the previous night’s Cubs/Dodgers game which the Cubs, uncharacteristically, lost 4-0. Everything, as far as we could do it, was like it was in 1974.